The Jury is: You!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: To Kill A Mockingbird. Presumed Innocent. Defending Jacob. Twelve Angry Men. Oh, don’t even get me started. I adore legal thrillers, and devour them.

(And may I say? THE MURDER LIST was the NUMBER ONE legal thriller on Amazon this week. And here is the astonishing proof! Whoa. And um, now it is ON SALE! for 1.99. Whoa.)

But didn’t you adore Adam’s Rib? A Few Good Men. Compulsion. Witness for the Prosecution. Oh, as I said. Don’t get me started. But attorney/author Michael Kahn—welcome to Jungle Red!--has some faves of his own.

Great Legal Thrillers

by Michael Kahn, author of BAD TRUST: A Rachel Gold Mystery



"Do you ever wish you could write a real novel?"

Ah, yes. The Question.

Every writer of legal thrillers hears it. Usually served with a withering disclaimer, such as "I confess I haven't read any of your works" or "I'm just not what one might call an aficionado of the whodunit." As if the commandments Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai included, "Thou shalt place no Perry Masons before thee."

Welcome to the world of the literary snob, that rarified zone where the so-called genre fictions — mysteries, horror, romance — are the riffraff of fiction, grubbing out an existence in that noisy rock quarry far beneath that celestial realm known as "literature.” And no amount of examples from Erle Stanley Gardner to Scott Turow will convince our snob. That’s because, as he will snidely point out, you won’t find those books on the syllabus of any Great World Literature college course.

Okay. Let’s take him up on that claim. He may not realize that the legal thriller, with its courtroom clash of vivid personalities, compelling facts, and moral dilemmas, has inspired playwrights and novelists for centuries. 

Fictional lawyers and trials have played a significant role in literary classics since at least Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, whose cast of pilgrims includes the Man of Law. Others might point further back to the trial of Socrates in 399 B.C.E.

I’ve picked three of my favorite literary classics that use the courtroom as their dramatic engine. All three would make any snob’s list of great literature. The common theme in these three is a grim one: a courtroom is no place to seek justice, redemption, or satisfactory closure.

We readers watch from the courtroom gallery as the legal system grinds out injustice in the name of the law in these brilliant works of literature.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Bleak House is one of the greatest novels by one of the giants of English literature. It is also, in the words of one legal scholar, “the ultimate indictment of law, lawyers, and the legal system in the English language."
The engine of this novel is a massive trusts-and-estates case that has been slogging through the Court of Chancery for decades. In a novel filled with wonderfully Dickensian names—the money-grubbing attorney Vholes, the arrogant baronet Sir Dedlock, the sleazy loan shark Smallweed—it is fitting that the lawsuit’s name sounds more like a double dose of symptoms from a liver ailment: Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

The essence of what Dickens has to say about justice and the legal system is captured in the novel’s extraordinary first chapter—which, in my view, is the most vivid opening chapter in all of English literature. It starts with the equivalent of a Hollywood tracking shot through the streets of London on a cold and muddy November morning:

“As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."

The sky is overcast, the city shrouded in fog, as we approach the Court of Chancery:

"The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”

Dickens then introduces us to the proceedings underway. He captures that lawsuit, every bit as foggy and dangerous as London itself, in one magical paragraph, which begins:

“This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.

Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit.”

Finish reading that paragraph, and the rest of that enthralling first chapter, and you will be hooked.

Billy Budd: Foretopman by Herman Melville

The manuscript for this remarkable novella was discovered among Herman Melville’s papers after his death. Finally published three decades later in 1924, it’s now recognized as a masterpiece, second only to Moby Dick amount Melville’s works.

The pretrial plot is fairly straightforward: Set in 1797, the British Navy has been rocked by two mutinies. Billy Budd, a guileless young seaman, is impressed into duty by a warship in need of sailors as the Royal Navy struggles to confront Napoleon’s navy. The cheerful, innocent Billy, an orphan, is soon the favorite of the crew on his new ship. His only flaw: He stutters severely when under distress.

The malevolent master-at-arms, John Claggert, develops a hatred of young Billy, perhaps based on jealousy, and eventually accuses him of conspiring to mutiny—a profoundly serious charge in the aftermath of the other two mutinies. The ship’s decent and honorable captain, Edward Fairfax Vere, summons both men to his cabin, where he has Claggert repeat his false charge. Billy is literally rendered speechless—so upset that he is unable to respond to the accusation. The Captain, knowing the charge is false, tries to soothe him, but Billy, unable to speak, punches Claggert, who drops to the deck and dies.

Believing the law and the concern over the prior mutinies leaves him no choice, Captain Vere reluctantly convenes a drumhead court, i.e., a court martial held aboard a ship at sea. The trial, the jury deliberations, and the aftermath are among the most powerful and poignant scenes in all of Melville’s writings. Spoiler alert: the epilogue may make you misty-eyed as you read the words of the ballad sung by sailors around the world in memory of poor Billy.

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

The trial in Act IV of The Merchant of Venice has long been recognized as one of the most dramatic scenes in all of Shakespeare. It takes place in the Court of the Duke of Venice, where Shylock comes seeking to enforce a promissory note signed by Antonio, the merchant of the play’s title.

That note contains the infamous bond provision: If Antonio defaults, Shylock is entitled to the security pledged, namely, a pound of Antonio’s flesh. While that bond may seem absurdly grotesque outside the context of the play, by the time Shylock arrives in court he is by far the most complex and compelling character in the play, and the enforcement he demands makes sense within the play’s version of Venice.

Indeed, earlier in the play, when it appears that Antonio may default, one of Antonio’s friends asks Shylock why he would ever enforce such a bond. What is a pound of Antonio’s flesh good for? His answer, one of the most famous passages in all of Shakespeare, is “revenge”--revenge for the ways Antonio has abused him because of his religion:

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?

Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?

If you poison us, do we not die?

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?

Revenge.

If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?

Why, revenge!”

The great Shakespeare critic William Hazlett describes the courtroom scene in Act IV as “a masterpiece of dramatic skill,” explaining that “the legal acuteness, the passionate declamations, the sound maxims of jurisprudence, the wit and irony interspersed in it, the fluctuations of hope and fear in the different persons, and the completeness and suddenness of the catastrophe, cannot be surpassed."

Enjoy, in the theater or in one of the motion picture adaptations, including the most recent one with Al Pacino as Shylock.

So those are three of my favorite works of literature that qualify as legal thrillers. So here is my request: can you offer one or more legal thrillers from your own reading lists? Any language, any country, any century will do.

HANK: Oh, how wonderful! Loved reading this, and so wonderfully thoughtful. (Don’t you enjoy being here? Oh, we think about such wonderful things!) But I am in love with legal thrillers, as you well know, and listed above. I have left out SO many! So yes, Reds and readers, what are your favorites?

And hey--a copy of BAD TRUST to one lucky commenter, and THE MURDER LIST ebook to FIVE lucky commenters!






MICHAEL KAHN

A trial lawyer by day and a writer by night, Michael Kahn is the award-winning author of ten Rachel Gold novels (including his latest, BAD TRUST, the stand-alone novel THE SIRENA QUEST, another stand-alone novel THE MOURNING SEXTON (under the pen name Michael Baron); and several short stories.

His latest novel, PLAYED!, was published in July of 2017. As Kirkus Reviews wrote, “the spectacle of these ornaments of the Missouri bar attacking, undermining, and double-crossing each other provides brisk, sprightly entertainment, and the hapless defendant’s baseball background comes into play just when it’s most needed.”

A former elementary school teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, Mike wrote his first novel, GRAVE DESIGNS, on a challenge from his wife Margi, who got tired of listening to the same answer whenever she asked him about a book he was reading. “Not bad,” he would say, “but I could write a better book than that.”

“Then write one,” she finally said, “or please shut up. I don’t want to hear you fifty years from now telling your great-grandkids that you could have written a book.”

BAD TRUST

In this fascinating and fast-paced legal thriller, attorney Rachel Gold learns that family doesn't always come first...

An ugly trust fund dispute among siblings turns deadly when Isaiah, CEO of the family firm he stole from their father, is murdered in his office. St. Louis attorney Rachel Gold, hired to bring suit against Isaiah on behalf of his sisters, must now defend one against the charge of fratricide.

As Rachel and her team seek essential evidence, the widowed Rachel struggles with family issues of her own, including relationships with her young son Sam and her boyfriend Abe. The jury is still out on whether or not Rachel can create the work-life balance she is seeking.

Bad Trust, the 11th book in the fascinating Attorney Rachel Gold Mysteries, is the perfect pick for fans of Lisa Scottoline and Sara Paretsky.

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